


Happy Families

by ariadnes_string



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-23 14:21:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/927521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnes_string/pseuds/ariadnes_string
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tolstoy was wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Happy Families

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Lewis Challeng](http://lewis-challenge.livejournal.com/) Summer Challenge.
> 
> This also fills the "learning to be loved" square on my hc_bingo card.
> 
> Many thanks to thirdbird and alizarin_nyc for the extremely helpful betas, and to fengirl88, entangled_now and smallhobbit for the brit-picking help. All remaining problems are completely my own.
> 
> Title from the first line of _Anna Karenina_

This time, it was Lewis who met Hathaway off the plane. And this time, instead of impromptu signage and awkward introductions, Robbie threw his arms around James and squeezed.

He withdrew almost immediately, only keeping his hands on James’s elbows as if he feared James might topple over if he entirely let go. 

“Christ,” Lewis said. “There’s nothing left of you. Trust you to go down with a disease straight out of a Dickens novel. Will you even make it to the carpark?”

“I’m fine,” James answered, though in truth the shift from the pressurized cabin to the stale air of Gatwick was making him lightheaded. He was glad when Robbie kept a hand on his arm and pulled James’s carryall over his own shoulder.

Robbie hadn’t changed much in the two years since they’d last seen each other. If anything, he looked fitter; Laura probably had him on a strict regime of diet and exercise. He certainly seemed less exhausted than he had during the last few months they’d worked together.

James let Robbie guide him to his car—a Ford compact, new since James had left England—and sank gratefully into the passenger seat. His legs felt like jelly. 

“Here.” Robbie handed him a crocheted throw through the still-open door. “Laura made me bring it—she thought you might feel the chill.” The lines on his forehead were crinkled in worry. James wondered, with a stab of guilt, whether he’d been wearing the same expression since he’d first got that out-of-the blue call from Croatia. Probably. 

James took the throw. “Very thoughtful of her,” he said, tucking it around his knees.

The lines on Robbie’s face didn’t straighten out. “You’ll want to try and rest,” he said. “It’s a long drive back to Oxford.”

++

Robbie’s had been almost the first voice James heard when he’d surfaced from the worst of his illness.

Not quite the first. That had been Katie’s. She’d been perched in a plastic chair next to his curtained-off bed when he’d first opened his eyes onto a coherent world.

Katie was twenty-three, and churchy in an athletic way James found peculiarly American: blond hair pulled back tight from her forehead and always dressed as if she were ready to run 10k in thirty-five minutes flat. She’d gone to college on a track scholarship, she’d told James once; but then she’d come to Croatia on a mission trip and never left. It was Katie who’d got him to hospital when he’d collapsed, and she seemed to take her position as his rescuer seriously.

The first time he’d woken up, she’d just murmured comforting nonsense while the Swedish doctor made approving noises over his chart. The second time, however, she’d sat on his bed, twisting her mobile in her hands, and told him there was someone who wanted to talk to him.

“Solveig?” he’d asked, thinking their UNHRC supervisor might be checking in on him.

“No.” She looked down. “A Mister Lewis.”

It brought James almost to a sitting position. The room swam around him. “How?” he gasped.

“Now don’t go getting worked up about it,” Katie said, effortlessly pushing him back onto the pillow. “You’ve been really sick, James, maybe worse than you know. And last week, well, Dr. Carlson and I, we, decided—,“ she hesitated, then pushed on, “—We decided we’d better pull your employment file and see who you’d put down as—well, you know.”

She wouldn’t say the words, but they echoed in James’s head. Next of kin. James had forgotten he’d put Robbie’s name in that space. What a foolish, romantic gesture. 

“And even though by the time I got the file Dr. Carlson thought you were out of danger. I…well, I called him anyway.” Katie stared hard at the blank screen of her phone. “You said his name a lot while you were delirious. It sounded like maybe you missed him, so I thought you were probably close—and he’d want to know what was going on.” She met his gaze again. “Did I mess up?”

“No.” James patted the closest part of her, her knee. “I’m glad you called him.”

Katie brightened instantly. “Good. Because he seems like a really nice guy. I just loved his accent. Is he your uncle or something?” Katie herself had six uncles, she’d told him once, along with seven aunts, a mom and dad, two brothers, a sister, and innumerable cousins, all back in Georgia. A life without family was probably incomprehensible to her.

“No,” James told her—but what to say instead? His guvnor? A former colleague? The reason he’d left England? “Just a good friend.”

“I’ll say. He wanted to come out here straight away, but I got him to wait ‘til he’d talked to you—I said you’d be up to talking in a few days. I think he talked to Dr. Carlson, too. So do you want to do it now?” She held the phone towards him. “Or are you too tired?”

“Now.” Weak as he was, James didn’t think he could sleep anticipating this phone call.

Robbie answered the phone so fast he might have been clutching it in his hand. “Jesus,” he said, and James could hear him drawing a shaky breath before he spoke again. James drew a breath himself. “Jesus, James, it’s good to hear your voice,” Robbie said, in a burst of pent-up feeling. “You had us worried there. Who the hell almost dies of typhus fever these days?”

++

Out of some mix of sentiment and inertia, James had kept his Oxford flat. But Robbie informed him that on no condition was he to be allowed back into that drafty dust pile. He was to convalesce in Laura’s spacious bungalow, which she and Robbie had been sharing these last eighteen months and more.

James acquiesced. In truth, as much as he missed his books, he had no real desire to go back the flat he’d fled two years ago.

Laura, too, looked only improved by the passage of time. Her hair was a bit longer, and she’d filled out some, as if she and Robbie were working towards some golden mean of stoutness. Like Robbie, she first clung to him, and then fussed over him, scrubbing at her eyes while she reached up to cup his cheek in her hand.

They fed him very English foods—Shepherd’s Pie and mushy peas and something with toffee for pudding. James pushed the food around on his plate and listened to them talk carefully about nothing at all. It was hard to get used to at first, after having spent so much time among people for whom directness was a virtue. But he soon accepted the fact that neither Laura nor Robbie would bring up the events of the past two years—his departure from the monastery, his work at the refugee camp, his illness—unless it was absolutely necessary.

Their reticence proved contagious. James listened as Robbie and Laura discussed Gurdip’s marriage to a girl who’d made his traditional parents tear their hair out (though Gurdip adored her), DI Parker’s multiple speeding tickets, the relative dampness of the spring, and the number of foxes they’d seen in the garden, until they took pity on him and sent him to bed.

++

It came as no surprise that Laura was the worrier in the family.

“I don’t like the look of you,” she said, leveling her diagnostic gaze at James the next morning as he sat collapsed on the sitting room sofa. “I’m not sure you don’t belong back in hospital. You could be starting to relapse.”

James thought he should argue with her, but it was taking most of his energy to stay reasonably upright. Luckily, Robbie seemed prepared to take his side.

“It’s just the journey, love,” Robbie said, squeezing her shoulder. “Give the man a chance.”

“His colour’s bad, his vitals are iffy and his temperature’s up,” Laura continued, ignoring him.

“Only barely. Sleep and some proper food will do him a world of good. Look—you go on to work. I’ll keep an eye on him and if he doesn’t perk up a bit by afternoon, I’ll ring you.”

Again, James felt that this was a conversation in which he should be taking part, but it was beyond him. He watched Robbie steer Laura out of the room and flopped back gratefully against the cushions. After a while, Robbie came back in and put a mug of tea and a plate of biscuits on the table next to the sofa.

“Want the telly?” Robbie asked.

James shook his head.

Robbie pressed his palm to James’s forehead. “You’ll do,” he said, after a moment, withdrawing his hand. James missed the cool, calloused weight of it as soon as it was gone. “Put your feet up, yeah?” Robbie nudged at James’s ankle with his toe until James lifted his feet onto the couch. “Give a shout if you need anything.”

++

James dozed through the morning, only waking fully when the pressure on his bladder became impossible to ignore. He untangled himself from the blanket he found himself under, and heaved himself to his feet.

Only to find himself flat on his arse, barely missing the glass-topped coffee table in his ignominious slide to the floor.

“Hallo.” Robbie was back in the room almost instantly, dish towel in hand. “All right?”

“Mmm.” James waved a hand dismissively. “Just tried to get up too quickly.”

Robbie seemed to understand. “Need the loo?” He crouched in front of James with a soft grunt, knees and hips audibly creaking. He placed James’s hands on his own shoulders. “Here we go.”

Together they staggered to their feet. “Christ,” Robbie huffed. “Look at us. It’s the blind leading the bloody blind. Or the lame leading the halt. Something like that.”

Once they were standing, however, Robbie was solid as a rock. He kept an arm around James’s waist as they made their way down the hall to the bathroom. Thankfully, though, the movement prodded James’s limbs back into usefulness. When Robbie asked him if he needed any more help, he was able to decline.

Robbie still stationed himself at the doorway. “Don’t want you falling in,” he said bluntly.

James didn’t mind. Eastern Europe, and the conditions at the refugee camp, had burned away any modesty he might’ve had. “Not exactly the way I imagined our reunion,” he told Robbie as he washed his hands.

Robbie looked at him strangely, and James worried he’d revealed too much by admitting he had imagined their reunion at all. Could Robbie see how obsessively James had thought about it at first, until hard work and mental discipline had buried those ideas deep? He looked down at his hands, thin and gray under the tap.

“I’m just glad you’re back with us,” Robbie said, his voice more serious than the conventional sentiment of the words.

++

Robbie’s diagnosis proved correct. After a few days of nearly non-stop sleep, James did feel much better. Better enough that he took Robbie up on his offer to go by the flat and collect a stack of books. Better enough that one day he was able take one of the books out to the garden and read a sentence or two between naps.

The April sun was wan at best, but James huddled into a winter coat—also retrieved from the flat—and enjoyed the fresh air. He was slowly re-acclimatizing to the sheer abundance of middle-class English life: electricity that always worked, an endless supply of hot water, and fresh fruit and vegetables on demand. “How’s it going?” Katie had emailed; “Drowning in first-world luxuries,” he’d written back, and it still felt true.

From time to time, he would take a sip of sweet, milky tea, or pick one of the biscuits off the endlessly-replenished plate Robbie kept at his side; Laura had strong ideas about healthy meals, but Robbie staunchly believed that no invalid could be expected to recover without an endless supply of sweets. He wondered what it would take to convince Robbie to smuggle him in a cigarette. 

As his awareness of his surroundings had returned, so had his self-consciousness about staying with Robbie and Laura in their new state of coupledom—the advent of which had precipitated his flight from England in the first place. It wasn’t just that it was awkward to confront Laura’s tights hanging over the shower rail when he used the upstairs loo, or that he felt an outsider to all the verbal shorthand and shared memories they’d developed while he’d been gone. He liked Laura, always had—that had never been the problem. It was more that he could sense Laura’s own wariness in his presence, could feel her eyes on him when Robbie—his usual affection bestowed more freely than ever in James’s reduced state—patted him on the back, or offered him the last slice of cake. Just last night, he’d looked up from his book to the disconcerting scenario of Robbie gazing at him fondly while Laura watched Robbie with an unreadable look on her face. James had put his head down again quickly. 

But Laura was at work this morning, and Robbie was fussing with something in the raised beds he’d built at the bottom of the garden. He seemed to be trying to make one of the plants grow along a kind of lattice he’d installed—a task apparently requiring some finesse. Unlike James, he appeared to find the weather fine, and was wearing a blue-patterned short-sleeved shirt. Despite his best intentions, James kept getting distracted by the movements of his tanned forearms, the reach and pull of his shoulders as he worked.

Finally, Robbie turned around to find him staring. “What?” He laughed and put his hands on his hips. There was a smudge of dirt across his nose. “Mocking an old man’s attempt to grow tomatoes?”

“Never!” James put up his hands in defense. “Just thinking you missed your calling all these years, chasing murderers.”

Robbie scowled good-naturedly. He came over and flopped next to James on the iron-work bench with a contented sigh. He sat as close as he always had, a hairsbreadth of space between their knees, but James was relieved to find the proximity no longer made it as hard for him to breathe as it once had.

“Seriously,” James said. “I’m doing fine. Absolutely on the mend. You don’t need to keep a watch on me. You should, I don’t know, go out—you must have things you’re missing.” Robbie had barely left the house in the week James had been there—unless he had whilst James was sleeping, but somehow James didn’t think so. Maybe Laura wouldn’t be so spooked if Robbie went back to whatever it was he usually did.

“Hmm.” Robbie regarded him closely. “You might be right at that. Perhaps you’re even strong enough to come with me.”

++

“This? These were the duties I was keeping you from? I’m sorry I brought it up,” James said.

They were sat on a convenient bench along the towpath near Robbie and Laura’s house, three dogs sprawled on the ground around them. It was the hottest day they’d had since James arrived, and the dogs seemed as glad as he was for the rest. 

“Sad, isn’t it?” Robbie said, regarding the largest dog, a jowly hound named Bella with an expression that wasn’t sad at all. “Laura keeps telling me I should buy a boat or something—have a proper hobby—but I can’t commit. Meanwhile, just makes sense that I should take these poor buggers out whilst their owners are at work. Isn’t that right, love?” he asked Bella, who looked up at him with adoring, bloodshot, eyes.

“Hmm,” James said noncommittally. One of the other dogs, a dignified old pug named Chester, was nosing around the bench, picking up smells, while the other, a silky slip of a thing whose name James had forgotten, strained at the lead Robbie had looped around the arm of the bench, whining softly. James could see Laura’s point. But Robbie, as he well knew, wasn’t a man you could rush into anything.

Bella put her snout on Robbie’s thigh and he gently pulled at her ears. “You know,“ he said, “I did a search on typhus after I got that call from your friend. Didn’t know it even still existed.”

 _Oh no_ , thought James, _here it comes_. He tried to brace himself, but he just felt weak.

“But there’s more of it about than I imagined. Especially in situations like the one you were in. Still—“ Robbie addressed himself to the velvety ears in his lap. “The internet seemed to say—and goodness knows I could be wrong—that it’s pretty easily treated if it’s caught in time. And when I heard how ill you were, well, I—Oh bloody hell, James—I couldn’t help wondering if you were—well, if you were taking care of yourself. That’s all.”

Robbie wouldn’t look at him, but the three dogs, suddenly attentive, arrayed themselves in front of the bench like a canine council on psychological fitness.

James couldn’t pretend he hadn’t wondered the same thing himself. Lying there in hospital with nothing to do but contemplate his mortality. Had he really grown so detached from his own body he hadn’t noticed the disease creeping up on him, sapping his strength? Or worse, had some part of him recognized it, even welcomed it? No. He’d liked his work at UNHRC, liked the people there, felt he’d been making a difference. Even so—surely he could admit this to himself—there had been moments, at the worst of it, when it hurt to breathe and he couldn’t tell real from unreal, when it had seemed like it would be so easy, so easy to let it all slip away.

“No.” James cleared his throat, then cleared it again. “Of course not. I mean, of course I was—taking care of myself, that is. Bad luck, that’s all.”

“Good.” Robbie stood abruptly, gathering the dogs’ leads. He didn’t sound convinced; he sounded ticked off. “Because that was the part I couldn’t bear: the thought of you—what? Throwing yourself away? Not caring? Forgetting there were people who love you. Did me in, that.”

 _Love_? thought James. _Love?_

But Robbie was already far ahead of him, striding up the towpath with the dogs trotting behind him, none of them even glancing back.

+++

A few days after that, James found himself looking over the edge of a roof.

Not in a desperate way, far from it. In fact, he was having fun. Whatever tension there’d been between him and Robbie after their conversation on the towpath had dissipated by the time they’d gotten home. Or, at least been buried deep.

“Hey,” Robbie had said that morning, as soon as Laura left for work. “Fancy something a bit more exciting than Bella and the lads?” He looked as pleased a child going to the church fete.

“Sure.” The pleasures of indolence had started to pall for James. He felt cooped up, antsy. 

Robbie had smiled and clapped him on the knee. “Hope you’re not afraid of heights.”

And now here they were, cleaning the gutters of elderly Mrs. Parmington, two doors down. James was sure they were cocking up the job, but it felt amazingly good to be up on the sunny, steep-pitched roof, a breeze cooling the healthy sweat on his skin. And if they were fulfilling Robbie’s ridiculous standard of neighborliness to boot, so much the better.

After they’d dug out the leaves and twigs and other assorted muck—perhaps with more enthusiasm than thoroughness—they sat side by side on the roof for a bit. The contrast between Oxford’s neat, houses and the ragged, ugly, vista of the refugee camp filled James with a weird kind of yearning for Croatia, but Robbie blew out a sigh of pure contentment. “This calls for a pint, don’t you think?” he said.

There was a moment, though, as Robbie started down Mrs. Parmington’s rickety ladder, when his foot slipped or he missed the rung. He raised his sun-reddened face towards James, frightened, beseeching, and James, without thinking, flung himself down along the edge of the roof and grabbed Robbie’s wrist, prepared to hang on, or to go down with him.

It was over in an instant: Robbie found his footing again and they both huffed a laugh at the foolish drama of their position.

“Who lets unlicensed blokes clean their roof gutters, that’s what I want to know,” said Robbie, as James released his wrist.

They didn’t talk much in the pub, just nursed their drinks and watched the pigeons pecking around the outside tables. The sun, on top of the unaccustomed exertion, had left James lightheaded and tongue-tied. Robbie seemed to have his own reasons for silence. 

“When you left the monastery,” he said, halfway through his second pint. “I thought you might’ve met someone.”

“No. Not running to anyone. Just running away. As per usual.” Christ, he was drunker than he’d thought. 

“But you didn’t come home.”

And what could James say to that? That Oxford had never been home, or at least not the way Robbie meant it? That he feared the torment of seeing Robbie again, though, in the event, that had been sweeter than he could ever have imagined. Both were unutterable, so he just shook his head.

Against all reason, they both had a third pint, soaking it up with nothing more than a packet of crisps between them. Then they made their way back to the house with the slow, careful steps of men who didn’t trust their feet.

James went straight to the kitchen when they got back, grabbed a glass and filled it from the faucet. He was desperately thirsty and he drained it as he stood over the sink, and then filled it again.

When he finally turned around, Robbie was standing very close. “I missed you,” he said. Then he pulled James toward him with a hand on the back of his neck and kissed him.

For the moment that it caught James between thoughts, it was beautiful. Robbie smelled of clean sweat and English beer and his lips were warm and greedy. It had been so long since James had kissed anyone that he marveled at his own capacity to respond, to curl in towards Robbie’s body, to bring their faces closer together.

Then cognition crashed in on them both. They pulled apart and stared. James was sure the flushed, shocked expression on Robbie’s face was mirrored on his own.

“Fuck,” said Robbie, a rare curse. “Christ, I’m sorry. Fucking hell.” Then he turned and stumbled out of the room.

++

James had no idea what to do, so he fled. He grabbed the key to his flat off its tiny hook near the door and threw himself back out into the glare of the afternoon. Panic sobered him, and kept him going for a long while, but he was still a long way from his flat when it gave out. He sagged against a building, thoughts beating in time to his pulse: his fault; but Robbie had kissed him; but he shouldn’t have let it happen; it shouldn’t have felt so good; Laura, oh god, Laura. And then again for another round.

He’d left even his phone behind, so he eventually had to find another pub and convince the barman to take pity on a daytime drunk and call him a cab—he had enough cash in his pocket for that at least.

Chastened, exhausted and still confused, James let himself into the flat he hadn’t seen in over two years. Despite Robbie’s recent visit to pick up books and clothes, it looked untouched, dust motes hanging almost motionless in the air. He sneezed, and then shivered; despite the warmth of the day, the rooms seemed to hold the chill of winter.

What he did with the rest of the afternoon, James could never recall, but, just after five, someone rang the door bell: Laura. She wore a pink, floral-print dress, but its summery crispness only made her fierce expression stand out more sharply.

Swallowing his trepidation, James opened the door.

“Don’t worry, you can let me in,” she said. “He’s told me everything, bless him, but I haven’t killed him and I’m not going to kill you. Not that I can’t think of a dozen ways of doing it so no one would know.”

She thrust a carrier bag into his hands—a bottle by the weight of it—and strode into his flat.

“This wasn’t how I meant things to turn out,” she said without preamble.

“No, no, of course not—me neither. I’m sorry—unforgiveable—I’ll leave tomorrow.” James stumbled over his words, another wave of guilt and shame washing over him.

Laura just stared at him until he ground to a halt. “That’s not what I meant,” she said. 

She walked past him into the kitchen and found two dusty tumblers in a cupboard. She rinsed them, held out her hand until James took the whisky bottle out of the carrier bag and handed it to her. She poured them both shots, and drank hers down like a soldier.

“What I meant was,” she said, “that I never meant to get married. Never wanted children. Never wanted a husband cluttering up the place. Never thought I was that kind of woman. Look at me now.” She poured another shot of whisky and knocked it back. “I have bloody grandchildren, for Christ’s sake. Well, one step-grandchild, anyway. And now I’m a cliché out of daytime television: the cheated-on wife—and I’m not even married.”

James took a cautious sip of his own drink. It burned going down—his first hard liquor since falling ill—and mixed uneasily with his lunchtime beer. He had no idea what to say. “I’ll go,” he volunteered, wondering as he said it at his own impulse for self-sacrifice. “I’ll get out of your lives. You won’t have to think about it ever again.”

“I think he’s always fancied you,” Laura went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “But he never thought to act on it. Then you almost died, and it changed things. I’m just trying to figure out how I feel about it. It’s not that I’ll miss playing happy families. It never seemed real anyway. But I love him, James. I really do love him very much.”

They both looked down at their glasses, swirling what remained of their drinks. James wanted to say that he loved Robbie too, loved him as much as Laura did. But the words had remained unsaid so long that they refused to be uttered now. He thought Laura probably knew, anyway.

After a moment, James realized that there was something left in the carrier bag still swinging from his hand. A carton of cigarettes, he saw, drawing it out. “So you did come to kill me after all.” 

Laura laughed—an abrupt, jagged sound—and shrugged.

They leaned companionably against his kitchen worktop. The first draw of tobacco set him hacking so hard Laura had to pound him on the back, but it felt like heaven. She drew on hers delicately—James didn’t think he’d ever seen her smoke before.

“I don’t think I could ever love two people, do you?” she asked. James shook his head. “Not at the same time—not even sequentially. It took me long enough to love even one. But perhaps he’s different. Perhaps he can. He loved Val. He loves me. He loves you.” She seemed to be trying out all combinations, like a logic problem. “Perhaps we shouldn’t jump to the conventional conclusions.”

++

After Laura left, James smoked a second cigarette and downed another glass of whiskey. The combination left him dizzy, queasy and very, very cold—the long-held chill of the flat settling in his bones. He knew he should eat something, but the cupboards had been empty for two years, and he was too exhausted to venture out.

He cocooned himself in the bed instead, leaving all his clothes on and pulling the extra duvet from the closet to pile on top. The sheets—they must’ve been the ones he’d left here two years ago—were musty, but he tried to concentrate on the smell of Robbie and Laura’s washing powder still lingering on his shirt.

Even under the layers, James shivered. His head hurt, too, and a part of him wondered whether he might be beginning some sort of relapse. But he was too tired to do anything about it. 

It was still early, and he could hear people passing on the street outside: a pair of blokes shouting drunkenly about where to go to next; a group of teenage girls shrieking with giggles. It came to him, very clearly, that no matter how things turned out with Robbie and Laura, he couldn’t stay in England. Lines from some poem—was it by James Merrill?—circled through his head: _make some kind of house/Out of the life lived, out of the love spent_. But this wasn’t his home now, if it ever had been. 

Where would he go? Back to Croatia? Solveig liked him, and he had done good work at the camp, he knew that. She’d lecture him a bit about taking care of his health, but she’d take him back. Perhaps she’d even help him find a posting farther south, in Macedonia, or even Sudan.

Those places would be dangerous, of course, but he put that thought aside for the moment and imagined instead the force of the sun on wide plains, a hot wind on his bare limbs, until finally, warmed by his own thoughts, he fell asleep.

++

When he awoke, Robbie was sitting on the edge of the bed holding his hand to James’s forehead.

James blinked, and Robbie snatched back his hand. As if to keep it from getting into any more trouble, he clasped both hands together and put them between his knees, lowering his head. “Sorry” he said. “Didn’t mean to wake you. You just looked a bit poorly, under all those covers.” He seemed in the same mood as yesterday, anxious, penitent. Yet here he was. How had he gotten in? Had James been dazed enough last night not to have locked the door?

“I’m all right,” James said. “Just got a bit fagged out, that’s all.” It was true, he realized. He felt fine, well-rested, even, if a bit stifled by the duvets. He shoved them aside.

“Thank goodness.” Robbie looked up at him. “Laura’s gone.”

“What?” James pushed himself up against the headboard. “I’m so sorry.”

“Not like that,” Robbie said, though his eyes were troubled. “Nothing that final. She’s gone to her sister’s for the weekend. Said she wanted to give us some space.” He said it as if Laura had arranged for them to be ejected into orbit. “All very civilized, it was. She’ll be back tomorrow teatime. Or so she says.”

So this was Laura’s unconventional conclusion. “Oh.”

“I don’t know what we do now.” A range of emotions played across Robbie’s face: confusion, hurt, hope, and then a familiar resolution. “But I wanted to say sorry about buggering off like that yesterday. I don’t want you to think that it was your fault—or that I didn’t mean to—didn’t want to—“

James stopped him, sureness rising from some unexpected place in his chest. Maybe Laura’s whisky and cigarettes had absolved him after all. “Robbie,” he said. “Do you still want to kiss me?”

Robbie nodded, sheepish, but clear.

James pulled him down so sharply that Robbie had to brace himself hard against the bed. And then their lips, their hands, most of their bodies were entwined. James pushed and tugged at Robbie’s clothes—he was going too fast, he knew, but he didn’t know how long he had before permission was withdrawn or his own confidence gave out, and he wanted as much of Robbie as he could get, he wanted all of him.

Finally, Robbie grabbed one of his wrists and said, “Slow down, lad—give a geezer a chance.”

James reined himself in with an effort, and watched Robbie first unbutton his own shirt and then reach his hands under James’s t-shirt to slip it over his head. James took a deep, involuntary breath as Robbie worked the button of his jeans. Robbie’s warm hands on his ribs, his stomach, his hips might well have been the best thing he’d ever felt.

“Shhh,” said Robbie, “Easy now,” and the kindness in his voice was the same as always, even in these unimagined circumstances. It was almost unbearably moving. “I have no idea what we’re doing, but we have literally all day to figure it out.”

++

Afterwards, Robbie dozed, halfway on his belly, head pillowed on his arm. James watched him. He’d dreamed this many times. It was one of the things that made him leave the monastery. The dream had harried him like a vengeful ghost while he’d been ill. Except in those dreams, whenever he’d reached out to touch Robbie, Robbie had disappeared. Or worse.

Struck with sudden trepidation, he reached out now, tracing a careful finger around a spray of moles at the small of Robbie’s back. The flesh was warm and solid under his hand.

Waking, Robbie rolled to face him. “What is it?” he said. “Why can I still not tell what you’re thinking, after all these years?”

“Nothing.” James smiled and kissed the point of his shoulder, just because he could. “Only that I’m famished.” 

Later, when he thought back on that first, strange, wonderful day, one of the things James most remembered was how hungry he was. They went to a café they’d frequented when they worked together and ordered eggs and chips. 

After James had stolen two chips off Robbie’s plate, Robbie pushed the whole thing towards him. “Or shall I just order you a second helping?” he asked, laughing.

“Both, I think,” said James, his mouth full.

It delighted Robbie. When James demolished a plate of sandwiches a few hours later, he brushed a crumb off the corner of James’s mouth with his thumb, and then leaned in to kiss him. “My lovely, greedy boy,” he said.

Creatures of habit, both, they didn’t stray much from their usual routine. They walked the dogs, and then Robbie worked on his tomatoes while James read. It was all utterly different, though and not just because every smile, every brush of their hands made him ache with desire—a desire he knew he could satisfy as soon as they were alone. It went deeper than that; James felt as if something were being loosed inside him, unknotted, leaving him—he hardly knew how to put it—unfurled, perhaps, reveling in the wind.

They barely left each others' sight. When James showered after dinner, Robbie slipped in with him and they made love there, too, slowly, mindful of the slippery tile.

 _This is real_ , he told himself as they brushed their teeth together, their reflections pink and a bit gobsmacked in the bathroom mirror. _This is real_.

++

True to her word, Laura came back the next afternoon. She found them at the dining room table, drinking tea, James munching his way through a packet of chocolate biscuits. She paused in the doorway, seeming to scan each of them in turn. James wondered what she saw, whether he was as changed on the outside as he felt inside.

“So,” she said, “Shall I turn right around and leave again?” Her voice was crisp, but her eyes were as sad as James had ever seen them.

“No.” He stood and held his hand out to her without thinking. “Don’t go.” He’d missed her, he realized, for his own sake as well as Robbie’s. And he was no more interested in playing out someone else’s idea of happy families than she was.

Laura smiled, small but genuine, and turned to Robbie, who came around the table to her. “Please don’t leave, love—not unless you don’t think there’s a way we can work this out,” he said, pulling her close.

She clung to him for a while, burying her face in his shoulder. Then she pulled her shirt straight and dabbed at her eyes with her wrist. “Right,” she said. “Here we are, then. Who’s for a cup of tea? I’m parched.”

James vowed to go back to his own flat that night, to give Robbie and Laura a chance to sort things out. But after a long, boozy dinner he ended up no further away than his old bed in the spare room. After that, there was no talk of him leaving at all.

It was hellishly awkward, of course, but perhaps no worse than it had been before. At least now they could joke about all the things they had previously left unsaid.

“What do we do now?” said Robbie, looking bemused over supper that first night. “I don’t know how those blokes with more than one wife do this kind of thing.”

“Not a wife,” Laura and James said in unison, and Laura chucked a bread roll at his head.

In the end, the schedule took care of itself. Days belonged to James, and nights to Laura. If it wore Robbie out, he didn’t show it. And if James lay awake sometimes listening for sounds from the bedroom down the hall, he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t done that even before the current state of affairs.

“What do I call you?” Robbie asked one night, second beer tilted towards his lips. They were all sitting on the sofa, takeaway cartons strewn about the coffee table, watching some ridiculously complex Danish import. “You’re my domestic partner,” he nudged Laura with one knee, who snorted something like _lucky me_ , “And you’re—,“ he nudged James with his other,—“My what?”

“Your boy toy,” crowed Laura. “Your bit on the side. The retirement project you’ve been looking for.”

The last one struck them all as hysterical for some reason, and they fell about laughing until Robbie developed hiccups and James and Laura had to coach him through holding his breath.

Once, James lifted his head from kissing Robbie and found Laura had come into the room. How long she’d been there, he didn’t know, but her face didn’t hold the guarded, wary expression he remembered from his first few weeks. She looked—how to explain it?—as if the kiss had given her a kind of pleasure, too.

++

It was lovely: to feel wanted; to have a claim on their affection and to give his own so freely; to lie naked with Robbie in the spring warmth and feel no fear or guilt. But none of it changed James’s determination to leave. England held nothing for him beyond the walls of this house, and he couldn’t stay within those walls forever. He was restless.

Laura found him one morning at dawn, hunched over his laptop, booking a ticket back to Croatia.

“He’ll be devastated,” she said, looking over James’s shoulder.

“I’m not leaving. Not like that. Nothing’s being broken off. It’s just that I can’t stay here. I miss my work.”

She nodded. “I understand. I’m glad you found something that calls you back.” She leaned towards him and then her lips brushed over his—dry, experimental, chaste at first, and then opening a bit, probing. Before he could respond, she drew back. “I love you, too, you know,” she said. “We’ll visit.”

++

They all shared a bed, the night before he left.

It seemed like the worst idea in the world, and would never have occurred to James on his own. But Robbie was waiting in the hall when James finished brushing his teeth and said, “Come in with us tonight, yeah?”

Robbie looked rumpled and a little sad, his legs thin under his boxer briefs and his eyelids drooping. It would’ve broken James’s heart to say no.

He lay flat and unmoving on one side of Robbie and listened to Laura breathing on the other. He knew he would never sleep, but it was his last night, and so he tried to use the time to memorize the smells and textures of the room: the scent of Laura’s lavender hand cream, the feel of the fresh cotton sheets, the click of the shade as the soft English wind came through the half-open window.

So intent was James on the melancholy of the situation that he was surprised to find he’d drifted off after all. He woke to find he’d curled towards Robbie in the night; he had nudged one of his knees under Robbie’s legs, and managed to press his face into the warmth of Robbie’s shoulder. Laura must’ve done the same, for on his canted hip, James could feel a small, proprietary hand.

 

_the end_

**Author's Note:**

> James quotes from "An Urban Convalescence" by James Merrill.
> 
> There really is a UNHRC camp in Croatia, but as far as I know there's no incidence of typhus there.


End file.
